In my last post, I swore FreeBSD knew the hostname of my proxy server without me telling it – that was false. Here is what I had to do to install bash on a fresh install of FreeBSD 6.1 using a proxy:

Since the default shell (at least for root) is csh, use the setenv command to set the environment variable http_proxy like this:

setenv http_proxy http://proxyserver:port

Now, since the invalid attempts to retrieve source files by the ports system mucked up /usr/ports/shells/bash, do a:

make distclean

followed by:

make install

…ok thats not working either. To hell with this, we exported a proxy server, so:

pkg_add -r bash

DONE.